Rites for the Skeptic
A review of Mickiewicz. Forefathers’ Eve. Performance, directed by Paweł Wodziński at the Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz (premiere: 22 April). Schreiber notes that in directing Mickiewicz’s work, Wodziński “on the one hand seeks to topple Forefathers’ Eve, and on the other shows this to be impossible.” Describing the play’s central scenes, he outlines the characters and the community constructed on stage. Schreiber concludes: “The Bydgoszcz Forefathers’ Eve is a rite for skeptics which, unsettled by its own lack of engagement, tries to fill the gaps with mighty gestures and words.”
The Decolonization of Minds. Paweł Sztarbowski speaks with Paweł Wodziński
Commenting on Mickiewicz. Forefathers’ Eve. Performance, Wodziński speaks of his approach to Adam Mickiewicz’s play, which he calls a project that mixes art, politics and identity. He notes that Mickiewicz tried to inscribe a peripheral story in the center, and to build a ritual of power based on resentment. Bringing in his earlier productions: Krasiński. The Un-divine Comedy. A Theatrical Installation and Słowacki. 5 Plays. A Historical Reconstruction, he also speaks of the project of a community theater, where Romantic texts undergo revision. Wodziński calls his theater work an attempt to read Polish culture through the lens of post-colonialism.
O History, Why Showeth Thee Such Fury?
A review of the play III Furies, based on a script by Sylwia Chutnik, Magdalena Fertacz, and Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, directed by Marcin Liber (Helena Modrzejewska Theater in Legnica, premiere 8 March 2011). The author notes that Liber’s play “is the Legnica theater’s strongest statement since Przemysław Wojcieszek’s Made in Poland.” The play confronts Sylwia Chutnik’s Grandfathers Eve with Stefan Dąmbski’s Executor to create an image of Polish history “with a female face.”
A Global Epic
Jan Niedziela describes Matthias Hartmann’s direction of the Burgtheater in Vienna, which began in 2009. Niedziela explains the history of the stage and its directors’ various programs. He then describes the spectacular beginning of Hartmann’s direction: “After both parts of Faust played in a single evening […] viewers were presented the dilemmas of modern castaways adrift in the global village in the plays of Roland Schimmelpfennig and Dei Loher. […] And then a ‘telephone musical’ made by New Yorkers and Birgit Minichmayr, singing in Struwwelpeter.” He then describes the most interesting of the fifty premieres of this directorship, produced both on the large stage and on the two small ones: Vestibül and Junge Burg.
Everyone Wants to Direct the Burg – Jan Niedziela speaks with Matthias Hartmann
An interview with the director of the Burgtheater in Vienna.Hartmann comments on his staging of the two parts of Faust, which inaugurated his direction. He defines his program as a “theater of unlimited possibilities.” He also talks of the specifics of working in Vienna – a city between East and West, of his strategy for shaping the repertoire, of his work with stage directors and dramaturgs, and of inviting artists in residence: the Belgian Needcompany and artists from Oklahoma. He also explains his War and Peace performances as an ongoing work in progress, and responds to questions about Polish directors.
Vienna Versus the Rest of the World
A text devoted to Needcompany’s new production, The Art of Entertainment, whose premiere took place on 5 March at the Akademietheater, officially inaugurating the group’s collaboration with the Jan Lauwers Group at Vienna’s Burgtheater. “Formally, this […] performance recalls a great cyber-dump,” writes Brzezińska, who then proceeds to decode Lauwers’s favored leitmotifs, drawn from both pop culture and classical art. The author emphasizes the saturation in theatrical discourse with the issue of the materiality and legibility of art, asserting that the play is Lauwers’s manifesto, and demanding a redefinition of the key criteria of art evaluation and a return to the category of beauty.
Is Reality a Bad Place? Polish Theater of the Decade Past and the Critical Attitude
Kościelniak joins the discussion of the functioning of institutions in the contemporary Polish theater, with reference to Grzegorz Niziołek’s text “Almost Two Millennia and Not a Single God!”and Iga Gańczarczyk’s “Spaces of Ignorance”(“Didaskalia” 99, 102). Shifting the issue from questions of the institutionalization of language in the arts to selected examples from the decade past (Garbaczewski, Klata, Kleczewska, Rubin, Strzępka, Warlikowski, Zadara), he traces the process of theater’s isolation from reality and its closure within a circle of issues concerning “absolutized aesthetics.” Concluding his text by questioning the temperature and political quality of Polish theater, Kościelniak states that today’s theater does not combine artistic experimentation with politics that question the social status quo – its critical position is more “incidental.”
The Scandal of the Image. The Theater of Romeo Castellucci
Semenowicz chronologically describes the various projects and most important productions by this Italian director, and constructs a map of the most important attributes of the theater he has constructed. Describing the start of his path at the Societas Raffaelo Sanzio, he outlines the aesthetic ties between his performances and the concept of the iconoclast, and describes the “infantile theater.” He then traces the manner in which the mystical and religious symbolism functions. In the section devoted to the stagings of classical texts, he describes Castellucci’s approach to the text and characterizes his work as “on the actor.” In the “Ethical Beauty” section he tackles the issue of the form rooted in memory, which in Castellucci’s language is both the image and the idea that resides in it. In the closing part, “The Tragedy of the Future,” he writes of how Castellucci understands the essence of tragedy, and describes the Tragedy of Endogonidia.
The Program of Oresteia 1995. Notes of Romeo Castellucci’s Clown
A translation of the text by Castellucci included in the program for the play Oresteia, which premiered in 1995. The texts contains the director’s reflections on Aeschylus’s tragedy and its protagonists, showing his manner of thinking about texts, the motifs that were important for him, and the texts of other authors who were inspirational in his work on Oresteia. Castellucci writes, for example: “In Oresteia we are dealing with the principle of the ‘sacrifice crisis’ […]. It was Vidal-Naquet who said that Oresteia is based on decay. Oresteia is full of corpses. Sooner or later the actors cross over into death. In Oresteia the dead enliven the action.”
Laboratory, 2001
Texts by Chiara Guidi and Romeo Castellucci on the Tragedy of Endogonidia project allow us to understand their thinking on the forms of tragedy and theatrical forms, and their view of reality, which grew into this complex, ever-evolving, heterogeneous series. Castellucci writes: “Our times and our lives are entirely removed from any concept of tragedy. ‘Redemption,’ ‘pathos’ and ‘ethos’ are inaccessible words that have degenerated into the most cold abstractions. […] Returning to them does not meaning looking backward […] The theater I respect currently is movement-based. It is the tragedy of the future.” Then he states: “My plan is to question the very notion of theater.”
P.#06 and R.#07, Festival d’Automne in Odeon: Atelier Berthier in Paris and the RomEuropa Festival at Teatro Valle in Rome, October – November 2003
A reprint of notes, letters and discussions with Claudio Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher, and Nicholas Ridout focused around performances in the Tragedy of Endogonidia. The materials include a description of particular scenes, analyses of their reception, and notes on the dramaturgy, acting and the theatrical image.
Blinding After-images
An article by Andrzej Turowski on the spectacle and the invention, and the spread of stereoscopy. Turowski writes that the optical apparatus, much like the spectacle, altered the relationship between the viewer and the object. The author also mentions the landscape paintings of William Turner, introducing the concept of éblouissement, which means both to illuminate and to blind, “concerning the perception of light, the source of whose glow (...) both fascinates and engenders a physical pain in the eyes and body, a mental repulsion, and is unbearable.” Turowski analyzes Władysław Strzemiński’s To My Jewish Friends montage series and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theater of Death in this context.
The Fragment and Its Shadow (Shards of Mirosław Bałka’s Vision)
An analysis of Mirosław Bałka’s Fragments exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Warsaw – the first retrospective of this artist’s video art. The author leads the reader through the entire exhibition, describing the various installations and the tension created by their arrangement. The article’s main motif is the darkness found everywhere in Bałka’s art (“Bałka is interested in active darkness, in checking its limits and depth, tracing its drama and its energy”) and a poetic fragment, in which Fazan sees the violence of the “frozen viewpoint, of compulsion, the staging of the gaze,” drawing from Eastern aesthetics and the Romantic idea of “thought and perception as a fragment overlaid with a shadow of the unspoken.”
A Remnant of Art, the Art of Remnants. The Aesthetic Concepts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo and Georges Didi-Huberman.
Andrzej Zawadzki’s article is an attempt to grasp a few models of the function of the concept and the motif of the remnant in 20th-century philosophy, and its practice in the arts and art theory, based on the aesthetic concepts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo and Georges Didi-Huberman. Nancy and Vattimo demonstrate that a remnant is no longer a testimony of real presence – it is just a scrap or a fragment. The art of the 20th century no longer appeals to a metaphysical order, it is event-based and non-essentialist. Meanwhile, from the perspective of a psychoanalysis-inspired art historian, Didi-Huberman analyzes the impression as both the prehistory and post-history of art. Emphasizing the double-edged nature of the notion of the remnant as both a synonym and an antonym of presence, Zawadzki describes art as “the creation of a fragile material remnant in the equally fragile and changeable material of the world.”
Cyborgs, the Masculine Sex, and Split Identity
Writing about the relationships between new technologies and the theater, Jelewska chiefly bases her stance on Digital Performance. A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation by Steve Dixon (2007). Jelewska traces the relationship between science and art, and claims that “making art has, to some degree, become workshop research.” She then joins Dixon in stating that “European theatre is chiefly a technological product,” juxtaposing the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk with the “contemporary understanding of the modern computer as a meta-medium, unifying all the media through a single interface.” She also ponders the changes in the concept of identity that arise from the encounter between man and robot, their combination into cyborg, and the existence of digital clones.
The Post-Character. An Avatar on the Virtual Stage
This article problematizing theatricality in the context of virtual space which is open to audience participation and commentary is directly tied to the Between the Stage and the Console texts (“Didaskalia” no. 99). Talar recalls Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of a thousand stages, Chris Crawford’s notion of interactive art, and the “Crisis of the Character” in Jean-Pierre Ryngaert’s dictionary, and explores the etymology of the term “avatar.” He also examines practice (the Chartreuse projects, Desktop Theater’s staging of Waiting for Godot, the illusion.com project). At the crossroads between theory and practice, Talar attempts to mark and describe the typical attributes of the post-character.
Hamlet at Ground Zero. The Wooster Group and the Archive of the Performance
A translation of a text by W.B. Worten analyzing the Wooster Group’s Hamlet of 2007, made in dialogue with the 1964 tape of Hamlet directed by Sir John Gielgud, with Richard Burton in the leading role. According to Worthen, the play “not only addresses the problem of the transformation of cultural traditions (rituals of dramatic theatre) through digital technologies, but also the ways in which we shape the role of the recording in performance practice.” Worthen also writes about other plays by the Wooster Group and the project to create a new genre – the Theatrofilm – which was meant to counterbalance television in the 1970s.
The Sadness of the Web
A review of The Sexual Life of Savages directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski (Nowy Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 14 April 2011). Wichowska writes: “The play […] becomes something like a research project, moving in several directions at once. The subject is strategies and limits of knowledge, experimentation, and describing the unknown, foreign, ‘savage’ world.” After this assertion the author tries to discuss some of the play’s motifs, showing the shifts made by Garbaczewski and Marcin Cecko (the author) vis-a-vis Bronisław Malinowski, describing concrete staging solutions that reflect the creators’ strategy of going beyond the familiar “structure of (theatrical) co-ordinates.”
Creating Risks. Jakub Papuczys speaks with Aleksandra Wasilkowska
The artist who created the set and the Island design for the latest play by Krzysztof Garbaczewski, The Sexual Life of Savages, speaks of her work on the play. She describes the inspirations that led to the creation of the Island, and tries to explain how it was intended to function in the play. She also sketches out a link between theater, architecture and the visual arts, allowing for the significant broadening of the viewer’s theatrical experience, and the opening of new kinds of perception and cooperation in the work of art.
How Much Life Is in Life?
A review of the play Our Town directed by Szymon Kaczmarek at the IMKA Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 7 March 2011). Kwaśniewska describes the performance’s meta-theatrical frame in detail, the shift in time from Wilder’s text, the changes made by the creators of the play, and ties them together to form an interpretation. To conclude, she states that “Kaczmarek permits himself no teary sentimentality [...]. On the contrary – he severs himself from it quite radically, replacing it with melancholy, meditation, and tedium, subjects both used here and adopted as the main theme.”
Like a Mrożek Play
A review of two plays based on Sławomir Mrożek texts, performed at the Łaźnia Nowa Theater in Krakow for the “Mrożek” project: My First Vision directed by Weronika Szczawińska (premiere: 17 March) and The Emigrants directed by Wiktor Rubin (premiere: 13 May). Bryś feels that “Szczawińska sees the text as a conflict between male and female narratives,” while Rubin’s play has translated the “status differences of the social educated man (AA) and the simple worker (XX) into the realm of the actor’s experience.” The author notes that both Szczawińska and Rubin are interested in the condition of the actor, his language, the consistency of the discourses imposed upon him, and not in attempting to analyze reality.
... is like...
A review of the play Hamlet According to Radosław Rychcik at the Żeromski Theater in Kielce (premiere: 7 May 2011). Describing the opening scenes of the play, Żelisławski says that Rychcik builds an interesting interpretative perspective based on a mistrust for the text, quoting film cliches and appealing to the viewer’s imagination and his/her memory of Shakespeare’s text. The author feels, however, that the director quickly abandons these interesting tools and concentrates on a very literal portrait of the emotionality and sexuality of the characters, as well as the fairly formulaic resolution of the generation clash between the young protagonists and their parents.
La Luna
A review of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot directed by Mariusz Treliński at the Wielki Theater – Warsaw National Opera (premiere: 17 April 2011). Targoń describes the production, stating that the visual layer – by Boris Kudlička – is very closely tied to the interpretation. Treliński and Kudlička have created a visually suggestive narrative on love, desire, and, above all, death, using psychoanalysis, which nourishes the beautiful, suggestive, and often unexpected images and solutions presented here.
Consistently, with Passion
A review of Wolfgang Rihm’s opera Jakob Lenz, directed by Natalia Korczakowska at the Warsaw National Opera (premiere: 7 May 2011). In the first part of the text, the author builds the context of the play: she writes of the onetime project to combine the National Theater with the Wielki Theater, of Barbara Wysocka’s Lenz at the National Theater, of the opera and its composer, and the relationship between this work and Büchner’s story. The description of the play ends with the statement: “Korczakowska cannot resist a multi-layered materialization of Lenz – while also bracketing it, she seeks to set it up as an example. The strategy remains unclear.” In spite of some imperfections the opera holds it own, chiefly through the remarkable creation of the actor playing the title role – Holger Falk.
“I used to believe / In pretty pictures”
A review of the play America, directed by Jan Klata for the Schauspielhaus Bochum (premiere: 28 April 2011). Kwaśniewska notes that although the aesthetics of the performance oscillate between a Disney cartoon, a fairy tale, and slapstick comedy, it remains remarkably bitter, ironic, and even melancholy. She says: “Klata has read America through the lens of the final chapter – the Great Theater of Oklahoma. His American utopia is a cheap, kitschy theater.” As such, the play reminds us that “the initiation process, which involves cutting through the reams of decorations, costumes, surfaces, and conventions, conceals the mysterious, terrifying, ugly, and blurred faces of America, utopia, or perhaps merely reality.”
The Choirmaster
Irmer describes the artistic path of Volker Lösch, focusing on the social and political involvement of his theater, which has been called the “Robin Hood of the German stage.” He describes various plays by Lösch – The Orleans Virgin, Oresteia, The Weavers, Marat/Sade, and Berlin Alexanderplatz – and the “civic chorus” scheme that he introduced to every play, composed of amateurs who spoke of their experiences. Irmer claims: “Lösch brought in people who had probably never been to the theater, even as viewers. He also opened the stage to reality,” creating a new kind of documentary. Afterwards he describes and analyzes Lösch’s latest premiere – Wedekind’s Lulu.
Where Is the Source of the Disruption? Barbara Burckhardt and Franz Wille Speak with Bernd Freytag
An interview with Bernd Freytag, who trains the choirs for Volker Lösch’s performances. Freytag speaks of the beginning of his work in ten performances by Einar Schleef, in which he co-created the choruses. He first speaks of Schleef’s work method, the significance he gave the caesurae in the scores he created. He then describes his work with the amateur choruses: the work on the texts, which are not literary, and generally come about based on interviews, and the method of selecting the choir members and of giving them concrete assignments. He also provides a vision of choirmaster schools, or studies in choral speech at the acting school.
The Japanese shinnai Narrative and buy? Dance
The author describes a performance of Japanese artists in Krakow, guiding the reader through the history and the techniques of the forms used in the show: the strictly oral and somewhat improvisatory shinnai style and the buy? dance, which is a synthesis of various forms that have developed from centuries long past, in sacral, court, and folk contexts. Next Żeromska describes the four-part performance, emphasizing that the emotions were heightened by the tragic events that had recently rocked Japan – the earthquake and tsunami.
Celebrations of Reciprocity
Julia Hoczyk describes the latest edition of the Spring Festival: “After editions […]that gathered reinterpretations of famous choreography and compositions imported from outstanding artists around the world (including Raimund Hoghe, Daniel Léveillé, Klaus Obermeier, and Xavier Le Roy), the time has again come for their Polish recreation.” Though the main event of the festival was meant to be Le Sacre du Printemps prepared by Claudia Castellucci, in Hoczyk’s opinion “it was the Polish premieres that turned out to be most interesting and which will go down in the history of the event.” The author describes and analyzes Le Sacre by Dada Theater von Bzdülöw and The Rites of Spring by Janusz Orlik, prepared together with Nicholas Keegan from England, and with Joel Claesson.
Physicality, Identity, (De)construction. Five Years of Solo Projekt
Hoczyk sums up five years of Poland’s first residency for young choreographers – Solo Projekt at the Old Brewery. Analyzing the performances by the various residents – Anita Wach, Dominika Knapik, Małgorzata Haduch, Ramona Nagabczyńska, Magdalena Przybysz, Aleksandra Borys, Rafał Urbacki and Anna Nowicka – the author asks what Solo Projekt is, how its premises are realized, how this program affects the development of the winning professionals, and at what moment they artistically encounter their own selves on their creative paths. To conclude, she outlines the attributes of all the artists: their turn toward issues of the body, identity, and subjectivity, and finally, their attempts to be open to social discourse and the politics of physicality.
Dance in Outline
A review of Wojciech Klimczyk’s book Body Visionaries. A Panorama of Modern Dance Theater. The reviewer indicates the problems that arise while reading the book, as a result of the new terminology introduced by Klimczyk without prior explanation, and the scope of the material in the book. Królica also questions the manner of classifying phenomena and artists in latter part of the book, which is a personal overview of modern dance. Moreover, he demonstrates how essential information has been omitted from the artists’ biographies, the lack of description of Polish dance theater, and the lack of a declared shape for the book, which is “neither an overview, nor a textbook, nor a lexicon, nor a dictionary.” Nonetheless, Królica appreciates the role this publication might play in popularizing dance theater in Poland.
Tangled Images of Our Times
A review of two plays shown during Berlin Day at this year’s Counterpoint Festival in Szczecin. To the critic’s mind, The Return of Odysseus directed by David Marton of Schaubühne Theater is a remarkably intelligent and subversive play on the various discursive entanglements of Odysseus as an archetype of our culture, with its increasingly blurred presence in the modern world (in relation to the original). Bakunin in the Back Seat, directed at the Deutches Theater by Sabine Auf der Heyde, in turn, is an audience-friendly and intelligent critique of the capitalist system, which manages to avoid dogmatism and imposes no solutions on the audience.
Tower of Song
An article devoted to Meredith Monk, a singer, and a film and theater director. Stasiowska describes the projects, plays, and films she has been creating for over fifty years. Analyzing the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble Songs of Ascension performed at the Polski Theater in Wrocław in March 2011, she tries to mark out the attributes characteristic of Monk’s work, such as the unified treatment of sound and body movement, resulting from Monk’s sight disabilities, and the Dalcrouz rhythm lessons she attended as a child.
The Maracatu
A text devoted to the African royal processions cultivated in Brazil. The author describes the history of the of the processions known as maracatu, and systematizes their various regional forms, pointing out the many traditions and cultures mixing in these processions. “Emerging from the colonial processions, the maracatu is a cultural collage, a mosaic composed of the most diverse, and not necessarily compatible elements,” he writes, while simultaneously asserting that the multiplicity of maracatu forms is, in his opinion, a splendid illustration of the cultural fluidity characteristic of Brazil.
The Fastened Existence of Words
A review of Jakub Momro’s book The Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativeness (Universitas, Kraków 2010). Burzyńska begins her text with a statement: “This is not a book about theater, this is not a book about drama, it is not even a book about literature in the traditional sense of the word. [...] Nonetheless, [...] I believe it is one of the most inspiring books for the theater to have appeared in recent times.” The critic states that the book could serve as an inspiration for a deeper analysis of Beckett’s work by Polish theater artists. She describes the various parts of the work, pointing out that Momro depicts Beckett as a fully-fledged participant in the discussion on the status of the subject, as traced through the most important thinkers of modernism and post-modernism: Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.
Engagement: A Million Microcosmoses
A text devoted to the publication of Juliusz Osterwa’s Kiev Engagement, edited and with an introduction by Ireneusz Guszpit (Jerzy Grotowski Institute, Wrocław 2010). Jarząbek-Wasyl points out the heterogonic nature of the notes, forcing the reader to interact: “Spending time with this book, one has the impression of touching something that, as a concrete fact or positive proof, is forever slipping from one’s grasp.” The author lists various topics of the notes (on staging, studies on poetry and rhythm, a sketch on cinema and theater, and a list of the buffet menu) and quotes his attempts at poetic prose. The reviewer notes that the overriding topic of these notes is loss, death, and the passage of time. Jarząbek-Wasyl also stresses the role that the publication of this diary could play in perception of the history of the Reduta.
The Frank Truth
A response to Rafał Węgrzyniak’s essay (Paradigm,“Teatr” 2011, no. 4) polemicizing with Marta Michalak’s interview with Leszek Kolankiwicz and Dorota Sajewska on the play Polish Club (Theater after 11 April, “Didaskalia” 101).